The winner of the 2023 Cervantes Prize, widowed after losing his wife in a nursing home in the pandemic, dedicates his days to reading and writing in his chaotic library: 'Order constrains me'.
A lifetime has passed, but at 81 years old, Luis Mateo Díez (Villablino, 1942) vividly remembers the place that marked him forever. It was a municipal attic converted into a blood hospital during the war. A “ghostly” room in the Villablino City Hall (León), where his father worked as secretary.
There, among boxes full of copies of Corazón, by Edmundo de Amicis, a book removed from circulation by the dictatorship, he discovered his passion for literature. “I was a strange child who wrote, who read and who liked to tell stories, but today I am afraid of that child I was because he had a very powerful inner world.
